Photo of Dick Peterson, an eccentric and an inventor, and the Peterson dynasty, Heidi Barrett Peterson, his winemaker daughter and Holly Peterson, his chef daughter. Photo of Dick Peterson standing in his vineyard of Wrotham Pinot Noir in the foreground which is darker in color than his neighbor's Merlot in the background. Don't know if it really shows the difference in a photo.
Event on 7/14/05 in Napa. Craig Lee / The Chronicle

Photo: Craig Lee

Photo of Dick Peterson, an eccentric and an inventor, and the...

Image 2 of 5

Photo of Dick Peterson (middle), an eccentric and an inventor, and the Peterson dynasty, Heidi Barrett Peterson (left), his winemaker daughter and Holly Peterson (right), his chef daughter. Event on 7/14/05 in Napa. Craig Lee / The Chronicle

Photo: Craig Lee

Photo of Dick Peterson (middle), an eccentric and an inventor, and...

Image 3 of 5

Photo of Dick Peterson, an eccentric and an inventor, and the Peterson dynasty, Heidi Barrett Peterson, his winemaker daughter and Holly Peterson, his chef daughter. Photo of Dick Peterson's invention called the dp screw. It's a screw with an antibiotic of tetracycline that screws into the base of the vine to kill bacteria.
Event on 7/14/05 in Napa. Craig Lee / The Chronicle

Photo of Dick Peterson, an eccentric and an inventor, and the Peterson dynasty, Heidi Barrett Peterson, his winemaker daughter and Holly Peterson, his chef daughter. Photo of Dick Peterson with some of his Christmas trees he grows.
Event on 7/14/05 in Napa. Craig Lee / The Chronicle

Photo: Craig Lee

Photo of Dick Peterson, an eccentric and an inventor, and the...

PETERSON'S PROGENY / Most famous for his daughters, unassuming California wine pioneer Richard Peterson finally puts his name on a wine's front label

The farmer clipped leaf tips from a wild-looking vine with furry white and pink leaves that looked like peach fuzz, and let her take them for analysis. The DNA profile readout matched one in the Davis databank exactly. It was Pinot Noir.

Meredith called him. "Dick, you were right," she said.

But this was no ordinary farmer. In fact, he was an extraordinary scientist, Richard Peterson, a major figure in California wine history since the 1960s. The woolly grapevine was yet another experiment.

Tinkering in winery labs owned by large corporations, Peterson invented systems that revolutionized production, yet his most famous creation is unpatented. He developed many products, including the first wine cooler, Hearty Burgundy, both of which made his bosses millions, but for which he doesn't crave credit. He published prolifically in industry journals and played a large role in wines made by E. & J. Gallo Winery, Beaulieu Vineyard, the Monterey Vineyard, Atlas Peak Vineyards and Folie a Deux Winery.

For all that, even some wine insiders who know of his achievements say that Peterson's greatest contributions are his two daughters, winemaker Heidi Peterson Barrett and chef Holly Peterson. Those insiders however, have not yet tasted the wine he made from his mystery Pinot Noir. When all is said, done and tasted, this quiet rocket scientist of wines, now 74, may be best known for the way he has of nurturing great DNA -- his own and that of a savage Pinot Noir.

Three years after the vine's DNA test, Peterson quietly harvested the grapes and made about 400 cases of a sparkling wine with a hint of the skins in the color. He released the wine this summer, calling it "Wrotham" after the village in England where he found the vines. In typical, self-effacing style, the label -- finally, the first with his name on it -- bears only his first and middle names, Richard Grant.

The 2000 Richard Grant Wrotham Pinot Napa Valley Blanc de Noir ($60) is elegantly snappy, strong in backbone, balanced in fruit and acidity and with overtones of grapefruit, green apple and cranberry. Its character and structure suggest the potential for aging gracefully, like the winemaker himself. It holds aloft in its tiny bubbles the dual characteristics of old and new vines -- strong pedigree with a touch of the wild.

In a great intertwining of science and history, this brand-new Napa Valley wine likely descends from Pinot Noir vines that the Romans brought to England 2,000 years ago. This clone was cultivated and made into red wine by the Romans in a village called Wrotham (the locals call it "Root-um"), 25 miles from London. Wrotham winemaking essentially ceased when the Romans left, but the vine stayed. In fact, it thrived. It naturalized and grew wild, showing a remarkable resistance to powdery mildew, even as it was enshrouded in English mists. It was forgotten, however, until the late 20th century, when a tiny local winery began cultivating it.

In 1980, Peterson was in England to judge a wine competition. Always curious, he asked about local wines. He heard about the Wrotham vine and hurried to see it. He saw the grapes, tasted the local wine and took two cuttings.

Back home, he grew them wherever he worked and in the early 1990s, returned to Napa to the tree farm where he personally grafted and planted them onto 2 acres outside his office window at the Peterson Family Christmas Tree Farm. There, the funny-looking blue-gray grapevines resemble nothing else in Napa Valley.

Like the Wrotham Pinot, Peterson is a little-known pioneer who has survived the standard plagues of the industry. And like the Pinot, his progeny is impressive.

Heidi Barrett, 47, has made wines for Screaming Eagle, Grace Family Vineyards, Dalla Valle Vineyards and others. Several of her wines have received perfect 100-point scores from influential critic Robert M. Parker Jr., and sell for thousands of dollars at auctions. Married to Bo Barrett, winemaker at Chateau Montelena in Calistoga, Heidi also has her own two brands, La Sirena and Amuse Bouche. (See related story, Page F5)

Her sister, Holly, 45, teaches food and wine dynamics at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena, and heads Sea Star, which imports sea salt from Brittany, France. After she graduated from La Varenne culinary school in Paris, Holly worked at Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, Krug and RemyMartin, and at Tantris, a Michelin three-star restaurant in Munich.

Both daughters adore their dad. Both followed him from vineyards to barrel rooms to labs and to the family table throughout childhood. It was no surprise that both went to UC Davis to study enology.

Their mild-mannered father, however, was shocked.

"It didn't occur to me they would end up in wine and food," says the scholarly, patient man. "I expected them to be in horses. They used to ride through the vineyards."

Pushed to bring up memories of the girls' experiences in enology, Peterson says he used to bring home some of the experimental wines he worked with at Gallo, where his innovations included using wood chips to flavor wines, approximating the flavor of barrel-aged wine. The girls would climb into the station wagon with him to visit vineyards and see the "red volcanoes" -- crushed red grapes erupting through the must during open fermentation.

"Well, I just did my job," he says. "I used to come home for lunch with the girls and bring one of the sparkling wines we made from wild grapes. I'd fry up a hamburger and have a glass of that wine with it. Nothing special."

Peterson left Beaulieu and Monterey because of corporate takeovers. In each case, the sale occurred after he was hired. He acknowledges it with a gentlemanly, "I never knowingly got myself hired by a corporation," but does not say anything untoward about the travails of the bottom line demanded by those corporations.

He remembers Ernest Gallo telling him to develop "Nothing new. Just something good that people like."

Heidi says, "I watched him work for those companies. That's why I work for myself."

Peterson, who is of Scandinavian ancestry, was born on an Iowa farm. At age 17, he took his mother's canned Concord grape juice, some empty wine bottles and a library book and made his first sparkling wine.

The tall, rangy Midwestern farm boy went off to the Korean War. When he returned, he got a master's degree in food science, then a doctorate in agricultural chemistry, from UC Berkeley.He chose a job with Gallo over one with Pillsbury because "I thought all that sugar would rot my teeth. I couldn't see eating pastries all my life, but I could drink wine all my life."

In 10 years at Gallo's Modesto headquarters, Peterson was the company's research director and assistant production manager. He left Gallo to become winemaster at Beaulieu Vineyard in Rutherford in 1968, when Andre Tchelistcheff, BV's iconic winemaker, tapped him to step into his shoes.

Following that, Peterson left Napa Valley to become president and winemaker of the Monterey Vineyard for 13 years. He returned in 1986 to head Atlas Peak Vineyards in Napa as winemaker and president. He purchased Folie a Deux in St. Helena with some investors in 1995; they sold the winery in 2004.

Without hoopla, Peterson controlled the quality of most of those companies' wines. He put the Monterey Vineyard and the Monterey County appellation on the map when he mentored many of the region's winemakers, particularly on the reasons why some of their Cabernet Sauvignons had an unpalatable, vegetal taste -- many of the vines were planted facing north, and were thus too cool for the variety.

In Monterey, he also made California's first Botrytis Sauvignon Blanc and Botrytis Pinot Noir, and a January Harvest Gamay. During his early years, Peterson acquired the tag of "rocket scientist" from his colleagues and daughters by conducting hundreds of winemaking trials. Many of his innovations are part of wine history, including Seagram's first wine cooler. After Seagram purchased the Monterey Vineyard from Coca-Cola, it asked him in 1984 to develop a wine cooler, which he did -- turning water, sugar, alcohol, acetic acid and flavorings worth a few pennies, into millions for the giant.

Peterson put his ideas, some of them quite wild, through rigorous trials. As a result of his experiments, says consulting winemaker and former colleague Tom Peterson (no relation), "a lot of winemakers changed their techniques" and saved a lot of labor.

One technique was the bung-and-roll, where a barrel was rolled to keep the wood bung from drying out. He also demonstrated that winemakers didn't have to top off barrels of wine; the space left between the wine and barrel was a vacuum and not air, so the wine in the barrel did not oxidize.

His invention of the greatest impact is the steel barrel pallet, for which he gets no royalties. Winemakers used to stack barrels two-high using wood blocks. In 1974, Peterson presented a design to the Wine Industry Technology Symposium for a pallet that allowed barrels to be stacked higher, and securely.

"It revolutionized wine production," says Ralph Kunkee, professor emeritus of enology at UC Davis. "It was received enthusiastically and became a very important item very quickly in the cellars."

Because of the Peterson pallet, wineries could use formerly unused space, stacking barrels to the rafters. In true Peterson form, he did not patent the design, which is now widely used around the world.

"He took no copyright or royalties," says Kunkee. "That's like him."

Although industry experts think of him as a winemaker with solid science behind him, Peterson thinks of himself primarily as a tinkerer.

"I'm an experimenter," he says. "I invent things. When I see something new, it goads me to do something with it. Which is what happened when I saw the vine in Wrotham. The grapes looked like Pinot Noir, but the vines didn't."

Yet being a scientist and a well-read historian, he knew Pinot Noir had about 200 selections. So he cut two sticks of the Wrotham vine, bound them to clothes hangers in his suitcase and brought them back to California.

As he slogged through years solving corporate winemaking problems, he tenderly and scientifically grew and observed the Wrotham Pinot. In all that time, his daughters say they never heard him complain about his job or dream about his own label. He was known as a good winemaker, but as an employee of Gallo, BV and the Monterey Vineyard, nothing bore his name.

The Peterson women would like to see him come out of hiding. Holly, the wine- and food-pairing expert, says the sparkling Wrotham Pinot is now her favorite first course and reception wine.

"I'm crazy about it," she says. "It's delicious, has a delicacy, yet character. Since it's an ancient Pinot strain, it can even hold up through dinner."

Sure, that's the daughter heaping on praise, but she is not alone in her praise.

Peterson's colleagues say he's a modest man. They praise his good will and sense of humor (think a slightly geeky Johnny Carson), as well as his grace and devotion in teaching wine.

Heidi also says he has been under-appreciated. She always thought the steel barrel pallet should be named the Peterson Pallet.

"Look at it -- it's used worldwide, industry-wide, but no one remembers he invented it," she says.

The daughters also received the genes for having fun and living in gratitude, a philosophy that Dad models by owning the small Christmas tree farm, with 1,500 trees.

"It's fun. We love it when people come to cut trees," says Peterson.

Peterson looks back with no regrets, and when he looks out at the only 2 acres of Wrotham Pinot in the United States, he allows himself a little pride and excitement. He cultivates them with genuine affection, giving each vine the space to become its best.

"I don't ask any vine to produce a lot," he says. At the same time, he monitors their health with care and a degree of scientific detachment. That may be the secret of his parenting, nurturing great DNA, as it were.

"I lucked out in the parent department," Holly says.

As he lopes his way to his vineyard, Peterson will talk to his two pound- rescued dogs, feed the ducks ("the goose is a gift from Holly") and hand-prune his pine trees. All the while he talks history, science and art and tells pointed, but clean, jokes, told in a deadpan manner. His mind and memory are sharp; his stories prolific.

Peterson talks about his newest invention, the DP screw, which delivers antibiotics to a vine stricken with Pierce's disease, for which he is applying for a patent. He flushes when he's compared to Benjamin Franklin, who also freely gave away inventions.

"Ben Franklin is my hero," he says. "I've read everything about him."

Does the first wine label of this winemaker, Renaissance man and inventor seal his legacy? It doesn't matter to Holly, who says, "He is a great man because he's a great dad."